Do You Believe in Ghosts? She Said

I’m personally very excited to talk about this topic because ghosts and the paranormal have been one of my guilty pleasures for most of my life (along with TV shows about finding Bigfoot). I’ve believed in ghosts for as long as I can remember. I totally get that believing in things we can’t see is sometimes an unpopular opinion, but all I can say is that I am a firm believer in Casper and his friends.

I guess you can say that I had a creepy mindset as a kid, which may be why I love talking about ghosts and other scary things now at my ripe age of 21.

I can vividly remember writing this seemingly terrifying story about the Tower of Terror when I was in elementary school, while everyone else was writing about his or her new dog or the popcorn they dropped on the floor at the movie theater once. While I got some intense glares and even some tears from my truly wimpy peers, I literally thought I was the next Stephen King.

I think my interest in the paranormal reached its peak when I saw Theresa Caputo, otherwise known as The Long Island Medium, live at Webster Bank Arena a couple years ago. Now, I know this probably sounds so strange to some of you, because psychics draw in the most passionate skeptics, which is obviously fine. To each his own, right?

Anyway, something about listening to Theresa from our box seat about 5 miles away from the stage made me believe in the afterlife even more. I could never understand how some psychics could pinpoint specific details of a stranger’s life with such accuracy. I couldn’t believe that people were able to relate to

But what really convinces me that ghosts are real might be because the house I first moved to when my family moved from Brooklyn to Connecticut was haunted. Honestly, if “The Haunting in Connecticut” house had a less severe younger sibling, that would be my house. For a few years, there combination of strange occurrences and an overall eerie aura gave everyone in my house the creeps for most of the 8 years we lived there.

Doors would often open and close on their own, but it would be so slow that no one would really notice at first. I always thought the same thing that every foolish person in horror movies thinks: it must have been the wind. It wasn’t until my friends from school stayed over for a night and told me that our bathroom door (which was made of extremely thick and heavy wood, for the record) slid open on its own in the middle of the night. No one was downstairs but them, and that door took some serious strength to slide normally, so my already positive belief in our family ghost was only further assured.

My dog was also deeply affected by something in that house. Now, anyone who knows my dog understands that he’s a very strange guy anyway. He’s not the most social or friendly dog in the world (with strangers he’s a little tense) but his behavior would get extra weird on some occasions. He would sit in our living room, staring at this one specific corner of the ceiling, and wouldn’t respond if we called him. He would go over to his food bowl, pick some up in his mouth, drop it on the floor in front of him, and run away. He also refused to go upstairs to our bedrooms or downstairs to our basement and sat at the top/bottom of the stairs and whined whenever we called him down. It was like he knew something we didn’t.

There were plenty more occurrences there, but I don’t have the word count space in this column to go through each one. If you really want to know, just slide into my emails.

It probably doesn’t sound like much, but believe me, I didn’t truly realize something was up until we moved out of that house. My dog was suddenly more normal and went up and down the stairs like he had been doing it all his life. The creepy feeling was gone, and everything felt safer.

To anyone else, I’m sure this sounds crazy. I’ve always believed that there’s something else after this life, and I’m sure all the episodes of “Ghost Hunters” that I’ve watched over the years could be the blame for that belief. Whatever you believe in, remember that as soon as your dog starts dropping food on the floor you’re in trouble.

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The Spectrum is a student-run weekly newspaper publication first established in 1983. The staff consists of nearly 20 editors and more than two dozen staff writers and contributing writers. The writing staff is fueled by News Writing and Reporting Classes in which students learn the fundamentals of news writing, while being published weekly in the Spectrum.
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